How can we lock up children seeking asylum?

The detention of asylum-seeking children made headlines yesterday with a shocking figure – 470 children were detained in the first six months of this year. That suggests it will be nearly a thousand by the end of the year. These children and their parents are among thousands held indefinitely without charge, their only crime to try to escape torture, war, violence and persecution.

This figure reveals just how tough the UK is on asylum seekers and their families. Nearly a third of these children were locked up for over a month despite Home Office policy that children be detained for the shortest possible time.

Frontline workers in the small organisations and charities that support and campaign for asylum seekers know all too well that the UK has one of the worst records for detention of children. They have been protesting for years while the detention estate expands, pouring profits into the coffers of private security and construction companies.

I visited Yarl's Wood at the invitation of the Home Office about 18 months ago. Home Office representatives and Serco personnel running the centre led the way, pointing out pretty new wall colours, Ikea sofas in the reception area, gardens where children can play.

Beyond the gardens were high walls garlanded with razor wire. No amount of PR can hide the reality. The UK's immigration detention centres are prisons. As we trailed along its corridors, I turned towards a side exit. I saw a van with a Plexiglass divide and wire between passengers and driver. A detention custody officer lifted out first a baby, then a toddler, then a child of about four. Their dead-eyed mother followed, pulling her veil across her face. Their ordeal had just begun.

Recently I met three children who had settled in the UK before being forced from their beds at dawn. They spent two months in Yarl's Wood. The older one, 14, spoke of the fear, boredom, sense of exclusion; the horror of trying to comfort her distressed mother. She cried as she spoke without sobbing – she wanted the story to get out, but didn't want her schoolmates to identify her. During an attempted removal, her mother was beside herself, separated from her three children on the asphalt at Heathrow as they were taken to a waiting plane. The girl was held by the wrists by a man who told her she was weak, he was strong, he would hurt her if she didn't comply. Will she ever get over that?

In Natasha Walter's play, Motherland, a Kurdish teenager, Meltem Avcil, spoke about her experience in Yarl's Wood where she was held with her mother for three months aged 13. She and her mother were dragged to the plane and only released when Meltem protested so much that the pilot told the men guarding them to take them off. We are told that detention is used only for refused asylum seekers, but Meltem now has refugee status. As the Home Office figures show, only about half the children released from detention so far this year were actually removed from the UK.

The justification for detention is that rejected asylum seekers would abscond. Yet there is no evidence for this assumption. A thinktank chaired by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith found last year: "Studies suggest there is little risk of absconding. [The planned increase in detention] is a waste of money." Families with children are the least likely to abscond; where would they go?

Imagine your own child taken from her bed at dawn by men in uniform, bundled into a van and ushered through the barbed-wire gateways of a detention centre to spend however long it turns out to be. Any detention without charge is unacceptable, and that of children doubly so. It's time the government reassessed its ill-informed asylum policy, a policy that breeds brutality, racism and an absence of compassion.